Tibor Zinner
Kádár’s system of retaliation
The volume presents the inhumanity of “socialism with a human face”, the retaliation following the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.
Sources document the horrors of the party-controlled judiciary and reveal the means the system used to destroy “the enemies of the proletariat”. “Comrades! Let’s learn a bit of class struggle from the justice system of Fascism!”, the President of the Supreme Court began one of his speeches in 1957. As the book unfolds, we can understand how the Kádár-regime broke the “backbone” of legal intellectuals by mockery of the law, how it forced the few who would not bow their heads to terror to leave their careers, and how it replaced them with people who eagerly wanted to become legislators, judges, or prosecutors fuelling the machinery of retaliation.